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News

Black education leaders fight NAACP for access to charter schools

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Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores
Cato Institute graphs education spending against test scores

This story is from the Daily Signal, by Kelsey Harkness.

Excerpt:

A group of 160 black education and community leaders from across the country are pushing back against an attempt by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to halt all future charter school growth.

The coalition, organized by the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, sent a letter to NAACP board members on behalf of “700,000 black families choosing to send their children to charter public schools, and the tens of thousands more who are still on waiting lists.”

The letter came in response to a resolution drafted by the NAACP that calls for a “moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools,” arguing that charter schools have “weak oversight” and put schools in low-income communities “at great risk.”

Charter schools typically perform much better than public schools, because they have more autonomy from the unions.

Kelsey explains:

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are required to follow state standards such as Common Core. They do not charge tuition but instead of being run by the government, charter schools are operated by private nonprofit or for-profit organizations.

Typically, local and state school boards are in charge of granting private or nonprofit organizations the ability to launch a new charter school. If charter schools do not meet strict achievement standards, the organization’s charter is revoked and given to a new organization to operate.

In exchange for that responsibility, charter schools generally have more autonomy over their daily operations, including hiring, firing, budgeting, and instruction decisions.

[…]The coalition also cited a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University:

According to the most thorough and respected study of charter school results, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, black students learn more when they attend charter schools. Black students in charter schools gained the equivalent of 14 extra days of learning in reading and 14 extra days of learning in math per year compared with their black peers in traditional district schools. For low-income black students attending charter schools, the learning gains were even more dramatic—the equivalent of 29 extra learning days in reading and 36 extra learning days in math.

Why would anyone be against giving poor black children a good education? One thing is for sure: it’s always the Republicans and conservatives who are pushing for more school choice, and more accountability from schools to parents. It’s always the Democrats who want to shut down competition and force kids into failing public schools. Who are the real racists trying to keep blacks down? It’s not conservatives.

News

Obama’s Affordable Care Act: health care costs rise by the most in 32 years

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Trust Obama with your health care plan
Trust Obama with your health care plan

Should you entrust a “community organizer” to reform health care? What if he had no record of having successfully reformed health care in his resume – at any level of government? What if he refused to show you his academic transcripts? What if he had not a single private sector job related to health care in his resume? What if he had written an autobiography where he confessed to drug use that has very possibly damaged his brain so that all he can do is play golf and read a teleprompter?

Should you hire someone like that to reform health care? What if he only gives you one reason to hire him: his skin color? Should you hire someone to reform health care based solely on his skin color?

CNN Money explains what Obamacare has done to health care costs:

Health care costs rose sharply in August.
Prices for medicine, doctor appointments and health insurance rose the most last month since 1984. The price increases come amid a broader debate about climbing health care costs and high premiums for Obamacare coverage.

A recent report by Kaiser/HRET Employer Health Benefits forecasts that the average family health care plan will cost $18,142, up 3.4% from 2015. That’s faster than wage growth in America.

Medical care costs altogether rose 1% just in August from July, according to the Consumer Price Index, a report on price inflation from the U.S. Labor Department.

Premiums on the Obamacare exchanges are expected to rise by double-digits this year.

Some health insurers, such as Aetna, have recently announced they would pull out of the Obamacare exchanges, saying Obamacare patients have turned out to be sicker and costlier than expected.

Overall, workers are paying up more for deductibles. Over half of U.S. workers with single coverage health insurance plans pay a deductible of $1,000 or more, up from 31% of workers in 2011.

And the health care price increases come as inflation overall continues to be low. Consumer prices altogether rose 1.1% in August compared to a year ago.

Consider this article from Investors Business Daily to illustrate the importance of not picking a President based on confident words and personal charisma.

It says:

Employer-based health insurance premiums climbed 4.2% this year for family plans, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation report. That’s up from 3% the year before.

Since 2008, average family premiums have climbed a total of $4,865.

The White House cheered the news, saying it was a sign of continued slow growth in premium costs.

[…]”We will start,” Obama said back in 2008, “by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 per family.”

That $2,500 figure was Obama’s mantra on health care. You can watch the video if you don’t believe it.

And Obama wasn’t talking about government subsidized insurance or expanding Medicaid or anything like that. He specifically focused on employer provided health care.

For “people who already have insurance, and the employers who are providing it,” he said at one campaign event, “we will work to lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family.”

Let’s watch the video. I want everyone to see how confident a clown can sound when he lies about being able to solve problems that he knows nothing about.

He had no record of achievement in this area. None, Zero, Zip. And the same goes for his claims about keeping your doctor, keeping your health care plan, and so on. It was all lies – just things that people wanted to believe, that Obama did not have the ability to make happen. He had never, ever done anything with health care ever before. You would literally have had a better result if you had handed the job of health care reform to a turnip.

Honestly, someone’s skin color, sex, national origin or sexual orientation is not a reason to hire them to do an important job. Obama isn’t qualified to flip burgers in a McDonald’s. Why would anyone entrust someone with no transcripts and no resume to undertake such a momentous task? This is hurting real people – real people are having to pay the costs of electing an affirmative action President. We really need to not do things like that.

Next time, if we are going to hire someone to reform health care, let’s hire someone like black economist Thomas Sowell. At least he has experience in economics enough to know what happens next to all parties involved in a policy implementation. Obama, on the other hand, has doubled the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion – an enormous burden on the next generation of American workers. What did we get for all this spending? Absolute and complete failure across the board.

News

After recent terrorist attacks, Obama orders intelligence agencies to study global warming

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Democrats think that the real threat to America is not radical Islamic terrorism
Democrats think that the real threat to America is global warming

The leftist USA Today reports on Obama’s tough response to terrorist attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Excerpt:

A high-level presidential directive signed Wednesday puts climate change at the center of decision-making on national security, requiring agencies to consider current and future climate trends in all “relevant national security doctrine, policies, and plans.”

President Obama has long argued that climate change is a national security issue, and the White House trumpeted the memorandum as an “historic step to address the national security implications of climate change.”

But the policy changes are mostly evolutionary, following no fewer than three executive orders directing federal agencies to take climate change into consideration when adopting policies.

The eight-page presidential memorandum carries the same force of law within the federal government as an executive order, and its policies will carry over into the next administration unless explicitly rescinded by the next president. In fact, the first agency implementation reports required under Obama’s order aren’t due until February — the month after Obama leaves office. It also sets up a panel, headed by the president’s national security adviser and chief science adviser, to catalog data on climate change and its effects — and giving intelligence agencies more of a role in analyzing climate data.

We have real problems with real Islamic terrorists, and the President is concerned with global warming. I guess Obama’s top campaign donors didn’t get enough taxpayer money from “stimulus” grants to their (now bankrupt) green energy companies (e.g. – Solyndra) the first time around. I can tell you this: when I go to a shopping mall or walk around downtown, it’s not the global warming monster that I am afraid of: it’s the radical Islamic terrorists. Why doesn’t our government understand this?

Other countries DO understand this, though.

When the UK sees terrorist attacks, they do their job – protect the public from terrorist attacks.

The UK Telegraph reports:

Britain’s top spy has warned that terrorist groups like so-called Islamic State pose a “persistent threat” that is set to last a “professional lifetime”.

It comes as intelligence agencies are set to recruit more spies, with MI6 said to be getting another 1,000 staff over the next five years.

In a rare public appearance, Alex Younger, the head of MI6, insisted Britain had made significant improvements in the way it tackles terrorism but admitted there was little sign of the “enduring” danger disappearing soon.

[…]Asked if the terror threat from groups like IS and al Qaida had reached its apex, Mr Younger said: “I would like to be optimistic about this but we have got quite long experience of this phenomena now and I see it very much as the flip side to some very deep-seated global trends, not least of all globalisation, the reduction of barriers between us.

“It’s a function also of the information revolution and the capacity for ideas to travel. It is fuelled by a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and there are some deep social economic and demographic drivers to the phenomenon that we know as terrorism.

“Allied with the emergence of state failure this means that, regrettably, this is an enduring issue which will certainly be with us, I believe, for our professional lifetime.”

Last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review said £2.5bn was being invested in security and intelligence agencies with an additional 1,900 staff to ensure they have “the resources and information they need to prevent and disrupt plots against this country at every stage”. 

I wouldn’t have a problem paying taxes to a government that actually believed that it was important to not let terrorists kill me. But clearly my taxes are being wasted by this administration. They have been so clouded by fanciful faith-based ideology that they are incapable of doing their jobs.